The Internet commerce industry has developed rapidly in recent years. Rather than having to physically go to a store to purchase a product and transport it home, customers are able to purchase a product from a merchant's website and have it delivered to them by a shipping carrier, such as United Parcel Service (UPS®), Federal Express (FedEx®), DHL®, and the United States Postal Service (USPS®).
To make the shipping process more accommodating, merchants offer websites that can be used to place shipping orders and provide information including the shipping carrier identification and a tracking number. Customers can make shipment status inquiries by directly or indirectly accessing the particular shipping carrier's website and entering the tracking number associated with their shipping order. Merchants may also provide an embedded hyperlink to the customer which provides access to the tracking status webpage of the shipping carrier's website. The accessed webpage will then display the tracking status and some of the shipping details for the shipping order.
Customers make millions of tracking status requests everyday. Presently, there is no targeted advertising available on tracking status webpages that is offered to shippers and/or third party advertisers and that is directed to the customers who utilize such shipment tracking status webpages. Thus, there is a substantial avenue for brand promotion and advertising that is currently going untapped.
Existing methods of providing advertisements over the Internet do not provide an effective method for targeting the relevant interests of the consumers that directly or indirectly access shipping carrier websites to make tracking status requests.
Internet advertisements can be delivered by a search engine, such as Google®, Yahoo®, and MSN®, based on an active search query made by a user. Search engines deliver information and advertising content to a user by matching advertisements directly to keywords entered by the user. The search engine accesses its advertisement database and selects at least one or more advertisements associated with the selected keywords. The search engine then returns a webpage containing references to the documents matching the keywords and the one or more advertisements selected from its advertisement database. This method of Internet advertising is presently of no usefulness in generating revenues for shipping carriers from merchants and/or third party advertisers. This is because when a tracking number (i.e., a quasi-random string of characters and numerals) is used as a search term instead of a complete word, the tracking number does not itself provide any relevant advertisement selection criteria from which a directed advertisement can be chosen. Presently, no advertisements are displayed when a tracking number is used as a search term in a search engine.
Certain websites provide shopping carts in which a user can store items that they are considering for purchase. For example, see U.S. Patent Publication No. 2004/0064351 to Mikurak. The information gathered from the shopping carts is utilized to access an advertising database to deliver one or more advertisements or webpages that offer similar products to what the user has stored in the shopping carts. However, shipping carriers typically offer only shipping products and services on their websites, and thus the information gleaned from shopping carts will not be effective in targeting advertisements of merchants and/or third party advertisers to the interests of the customer. Further, the shipping carrier typically has no access or limited access to the process by which the specific product shipped was chosen.
Other websites require a user to create a client account to view content or make transactions, and deliver Internet advertisements based on information stored in the account. For example, see U.S. Patent Publication No. 2007/0106555 to Benson and U.S. Pat. No. 5,860,068 to Cook. When users create a client account, a unique customer identification number is assigned to each user, and the user is requested to enter personal information such as name, products of interest, hobbies, salary, gender, address, city, state, and zip code. This information is stored in a database along with the history of transactions made by the user. When the users log in to their account, the website accesses its advertisement database and selects an advertisement based on the users' personal and transaction history information stored in the database. However, with a shipping carrier's website, the client account is typically the merchant shipper, rather than the end customer. Thus, the personal and transaction history information stored in the client account will generally not provide the most relevant information to use for targeting advertisements to the interests end customer.